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Refuge In The West: In this world Oliver Cromwell is never born. The Civil War still takes place and the Royalists win. However they merely delay the rise of the Republic and the next war forces them out. The remnants of the Royal Family with the support of the navy flee with the remaining loyalists to the American colonies. They do not have the resources to retake the British Isles and are instead forced to consolidate their position in the Americas.

Today the Empire of Virginia is an immense and bloated superstate. Technically the Stuart Family still have absolute power but their control is actually curtailed by tradition, certain promises and nearly endless red tape and bureaucracy. The rest of the government is dominated by the powerful and wealthy whether they're nobles or commoners. Most rich commoners do tend to buy a noble title for themselves in order to gain more prestige as well. The clergy is now completely separated from the government and whilst still Catholic is fairly nationalised as well. However they are a really influential factor in society and the government do go to great lengths to appease them and gain their approval for certain issues and measures. Society is very Christian and conservative with strict gender roles and expectations for people born in the Empire. Men are expected to be productive workers, husbands and fathers whilst women are expected to be faithful mothers and wives. The staunchly Catholic attitudes of the Empire also forbid birth control and encourage large families which has helped keep the population growing but the birth rate of the white population whilst not exactly declining is now being overtaken by the growth of the Hispanic population.

The Empire grew at a fairly steady rate, receiving immigrants from Ireland and France predominantly until the 19th Century where they underwent a “Decades of Darkness”-esque expansionist phase. The Hispanic inhabitants of Latin America are treated largely as second class citizens under an Apartheid style government whilst the lighter people of these lands are granted full citizenship. Relations with the locals of Latin America was helped somewhat by the fact that the Virginians were Catholic as well. However this has also led to some anti-Catholic groups emerging and gaining popularity amongst the Hispanic population. Slavery was eventually abolished in the Late 19th Century but was followed up by a stronger “Back to Africa” movement. The remaining Black population is very small and their reproduction is regulated as much as possible to make sure that their population does not grow too large. The Hispanics are enough of a problem to the Virginian ruling classes. Economic productivity is still very high though sometimes that is merely thanks to sheer volume of production. Most of the hard and labour intensive tasks are handled by the Hispanics now but a certain quota of jobs will always be set aside for white people who need them. Whilst much of the population of Latin America still speak Spanish and Portuguese, English is still a required language and the majority of the population speak it as a second language at least. Virginia's more recent forays into Africa have been more difficult with the locals being drafted for the various modernisation projects designed to improve the economic productivity of the region.

France dominated much of Europe for a time until the Mid 19th Century when their various German puppets successfully rose up against them led by the remnants of Hapsburg Austro-Bohemia. The Hapsburgs would go on to unite the various German states and overthrow the French in one of the quickest and most devastating phases of conquest the world had yet seen. The Hapsburg German Empire, like the Virginians, is theoretically an absolutist state. However they subscribe to an ATL form of Enlightened Despotism that has created a tolerant and cosmopolitan if bureaucratic and elitist state. It is now the Hapsburg mandate to tolerate and sometimes even encourage the cultures of the people they rule over. The Hapsburg Empire's tolerance for other cultures under their rule has allowed them to annex territories that do contradict the largely German culture that dominates much of the empire. They do have a Protestant problem but most of that is merely masking various nationalist movements that oppose the Empire. German culture and language still dominate the Hapsburg Empire which has caused some problems in Hungary, Poland and the portions of Italy they failed to convince they were German in the early days. Catholicism is also the dominant religion despite their tolerance for other faiths which has also caused some problems.

Most of the rest of Europe is ruled through allied states and dependencies. Many of them are genuine allies and have even adopted the Hapsburg governance system. The Hapsburg alliance system provides them most of their power outside Europe. It is mostly united through mutual interest against the expansionist Virginians and the insane Turks. After the Hapsburgs tore down the French Empire they also re-appropriated their possessions in India. Unable to govern it as the single enormous corpulent entity that the French had they instead split it into various smaller but still substantial states that were then later reunited into a single decentralised entity. The Empire of India is still allied to the Hapsburg Empire through years of economic integration and cooperation as well as the old alliances that were left over from their period of direct vassalage. India is still a very divided nation, split into various subdivisions that have held up for now but may still be subject to some editing if protests for more rationalised borders keep growing. The inclusion of some distinctly non-Indian lands hasn’t helped matters either. The inhabitants of the Hapsburgs few colonies are still treated with some derision but the Hapsburgs at least don't view them as racially inferior, just culturally retarded.

The Ottoman Empire actually did a lot better under a different run of Sultans and even defeated their Persian rivals and became the dominant power in the Middle East. However they experienced an economic decline in the middle of the 20th Century (where the oil industries were the only ones making money), increased social disparity and eventually dragged the world into the Great War. After their Spanish allies were dismantled and the Russians pulled out to fight their own civil war the Ottoman Empire fell into a Rationalist revolution (an ATL form of Communism). The war had already ended before that point but the conflict in the Middle East simply escalated. Today the Rational Union of the Ottoman Turks is the world's boogeyman. The original Rationalists were quickly replaced by radicals after the end of the Revolution and forced the Union through a horrendous period of force draft industrialisation. The Union is still an Orwellian oligarchy ruled over (supposed) technocrats that make political decisions based on rationalised designs that are supposed to prioritise economic productivity and political power. The practice is of course very different from the theory. This system is still rather productive though still less efficient than the Hapsburgs or even the Virginians.

The Union still suffers from some Arab and Egyptian nationalists but the inclusive nature of the government has helped assuage some people. Despite the Rationalist doctrine endorsing atheism the Union still supports Islam and has incorporated religion into their own political dogma. They have united most of their Turkish and Arabic population by demonising the few remaining Christians in the union and building up fear of the Hapsburgs, Russians and Virginians through extensive propaganda and indoctrination through the educational system. The Union also has a number of puppets and allies in Africa, most of them Muslim nations, that they have built into their own small alliance system.

Russia did not lose the war as badly as their allies but still lost territory and had to fight a particularly nasty civil war that forced them to abandon the Great War about a year before it officially ended. The loyalists to the Tsar won and stamped out the revolutionaries but allowed a different kind of regime to come to power. Instead a Supremacist group rose to popularity amongst the loyalists and came to dominate the post-Great War government in Russia. The Russian Empire is a totalitarian and somewhat theocratic nation that follows a rather liberal variety of the original Supremacist ideology. Russia's industry is still very productive and even outperforms the Turks in terms of efficiency. Society is very authoritarian, stratified and Christian with lots of political rallies, omnipresent propaganda and church services that sound more like the political rallies. The army and the Church have a lot of influence in government as well but the Tsar has now become little more than a figurehead for the oligarchic Duma.

Technology is about the level of the OTL 1970s. Nuclear weapons were created shortly before the end of the Great War which certainly helped the Virginians obliterate the last remnants of Spanish control in the Americas (Buenos Aires is still radioactive) but there is still a lot of controversy about them. Computers are a new invention and still massive, bulky, slow and rather inefficient machines but the world powers are all heavily investing in them and the Virginian intelligence network has one of the largest collections of computer processors in the world. People have begun to seriously look into alternate fuel sources. The fact that the Rationalists control the largest concentrations of oil have certainly helped motivate the other world powers but progress is still very slow. Technological advancement and innovation are all endorsed and supported by all of the great powers so long as the researchers don't get involved with politics. Societies are generally more conservative and religious with the Women's Movement being considered a radical ideology by most people but the Racial Rights movement actually being more developed in the Hapsburg and Turkish spheres. Industrialisation is more advanced and widespread which is already having effects on the global climate and pollution which people are beginning to notice. Whilst there are no computer models for this proposed theory of artificial climate change but people are already running around looking for a solution.